Summer Reading Recommendations

The solstice has passed, the days are creeping shorter, and I think everyone now is out of school for the summer, even where I live in Upstate NY. I am going to reward myself for figuring out how to blog on my new birthday IPad with a coffee float. I’m starting another trip around the sun and it’s party time.

I’m mixing it up this week to wax poetic about summer reading lists. It’s not just that I want to fit in with the other blogging cool kids, but it’s been an actual thought since I was in high school about what I would assign teens to read for the summer if I ran that zoo.

A brief note about the one to which I was subjected: My high school librarian was very into her job and I didn’t appreciate her at the time. Sure, I liked her, but she also was committed to setting us up to do research in college and to turn our brains in a more academic direction than they wanted, even if she was out of touch a little. Her list for the summer was all.the.classics.

And classics? I have so much more context via college to understand them, but even I’m burned out on going 500 pages for a thoroughly disappointing ending. I was already sad about a relationship that didn’t work out, I didn’t need a woman living in poverty her whole life for choosing the wrong man. Life already looked like it was full of intense, irreversible decisions without those examples to haunt me.

I read Pride and Prejudice as a part of mine, and there’s no way you can love it at 15 the same way you can when you’re 25 and about to finish a million years of school and you wish there was a devastatingly rich man drooling over you from afar. Just to complete the already independent life you’re creating.

What would I have appreciated? Happy books that also helped me develop empathy and see the world through different eyes than my own. Because I feel like that skill helped me more in academia than having read Jane Austen at 15.

Challenger Deep, Neal Shusterman

Caden Bosch is a teen boy descending into the throes of a psychotic break, which manifests as a mission he believes himself to be carrying out. It’s so artfully done the way the symptoms start and then escalate into a real issue and everything, of course, culminates. But you’re swept into and fascinated by this whole descent and what it means to this boy. I have had an interest in Psychology since I was in middle school and the papers I did on mental disorders were from archaic texts with pictures of people that looked weird and totally unrelatable. But seeing from the perspective of a teen boy going through it? Brings it all to life. It might have helped me empathize with others at a time when I was so insecure that my sliver of empathy was confined to being relieved I wasn’t the one being teased.

Nickel Plated, Aric Davis

Nickel is a twelve year old escapee of the foster care system and he has it all figured out. Side businesses, figuring out how to live underneath adults radar in his own apartment, blackmailing pedophiles and growing weed. A girl, Arrow, comes to him for help finding her missing sister and what they find, and work to destroy, is a sinister system that’s all too familiar to Nickel.

This time, you’re rooting for a kid on the fringes. He’s brilliant and kind hearted and crafty and a survivor himself, through and through. I don’t know what it’s like to have to survive your childhood rather than live it, and I wonder how I would have taken this story as a teenager. Gratitude for my own stable home, learning about kids who didn’t have it so nice, or just the somewhat fantasy of living on my own terms. Although at 12 I don’t think I would have done anything differently with less supervision. I had some pretty dorky and harmless hobbies by then. But this book? Short and sweet and a 1-2 punch the whole time.

One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia

Delphine has to take her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, to spend the summer with the mother who abandoned them, who is still more concerned with her life that she has been about the girls. It’s the summer of 1968, and their mother sends her three black daughters to a camp run by the Black Panthers. Delphine learns about her mother’s secrets and her real identity and about the fight for racial equality, all while navigating that weird time between child and teenager.

How would this not expand someone’s knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement while connecting with the people it affected most? Delphine is relatable and is dealing with huge issues at many levels, all at once. You can’t even help feeling for her mother’s journey and finding herself.

Jane Steele, Lindsay Faye

Okay, so if you really feel that summer reading should give one a feel for the classics, YA is deliciously full of re-tellings that get close to the original story but in a light where you actually want to read them at a young age. This is Jane Eyre rewritten, and it’s hysterically funny. I almost abandoned Jane Eyre midway through, before the wedding, because it was too unrelenting in its sad tale and was going nowhere, in my opinion. This one never came close to abandonment. Of course Jane herself is way more tragic in the original story and if you really want to go Gothic or go home, the original is still worth a read. But I wonder how I would have done with retellings and the internet making it so much easier to access and know about books in your genre.

What would you put on this list? It’s in no way exhaustive. We had to read five so it’s not even enough for that. It would have been cool if the fifth was a wild card, designed to engage the kid on any topic they liked for the summer.

Let me know what I’m missing or what you think of my picks!